Marking Time: Honouring the Legacies of Agnes Martin, Alma Thomas, and the Gee's Bend Quilters
For The Armory Show 2025 in New York, Antonietta Grassi has created works paying homage to a group of women artists who have come from or have had strong ties to the American south and who have been important inspirations for her. Drawing on and honouring the legacies of Agnes Martin, Alma Thomas, and the Gee's Bend quilters, Grassi is interested in how these artists mark time through works that blend modernist abstraction with references to textile and craft traditions.
From Agnes Martin, Grassi inherits a commitment to structure, repetition, and subtle emotion through the use of delicate tonal shifts and fine line work to create meditative, contemplative surfaces. Thomas's influence is felt in Grassi's rhythmic use of pattern and color, channeling energy and movement within a restrained, grid-based framework. Thomas's cellular patterns find a visual echo in Grassi's repetitive motifs and blocky geometries, though Grassi's repetitions are less tied to nature and more to textile grids, motherboards, and coding systems.
Perhaps most profoundly, Grassi connects with and honours the legacy of the Gee's Bend quilters through her references to textiles, imperfect geometry, and the elevation of craft as a vehicle for memory and meaning. Grassi considers the Gee's Bend quilts as important as any other works in the modernist canon of abstraction. She highlights the woven, patched, and layered nature of quilts while referencing coding systems. Unlike the mathematical precision of weaving, Grassi's painting process is intuitive and responsive to her environment, much like the quilters.
In conversation with these pioneering women artists, Grassi has also honoured the contributions of women such as Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace, whose innovative work in coding laid the foundations for the digital systems that inspire Grassi's own engagement with the intersection of technology and craft.
In honouring these artists, Grassi seeks to blur the boundaries between abstraction and narrative, technology and tradition—creating a body of work that speaks to both our contemporary digital culture yet is deeply rooted in feminist and craft-based histories. Through this synthesis, she articulates her own way of marking time: a layered, rhythmic language that holds memory, gesture, and technology in quiet conversation with these seminal women artists.
ANTONIETTA GRASSI
2024 GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP AWARD RECIPIENT
Antonietta Grassi’s paintings recontextualize the history of abstract art, emphasizing the vital role of female labor in technological advancements. By referencing textiles, technology, and women’s contributions to early computer systems, her work draws a parallel between the loom and the origins of computer programming. Though rooted in modernist painting traditions, Grassi’s art reflects the contemporary condition of living in an overly digitised, dematerialised world, while seeking to reconnect with a more embodied and spiritual experience.
Grassi is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Quebec. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in Canada, the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Grassi’s work is in public, corporate, and private collections, including the Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec, Museée d’arts contemporains de Baie- Saint -Paul, Groupe Desjardins, BLG, Global Affairs Canada, the Canadian Embassies in Dubai and in Tunisia, Conseil des Arts et lettres du Québec, Archives of Ontario, Yamana Gold, Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Capital One (MIT), the Boston Public Library and the Museo MAACK (Kalenarte). She has participated in several residencies such as the International Studio and Curatorial Program, the Ragdale Foundation, the Studios at Mass MoCA, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Centre, Centre SAGAMIE and the International Symposium of Contemporary Art at Baie- Saint -Paul. She holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Grassi lives and works in Montreal where she is a professor in the Visual Arts Faculty at Dawson College.
The machine and its history are common themes in Grassi’s paintings. But while acknowledging the sad fate of discarded parts, these machines are anything but disheartening. They are gloriously bright, autonomous beings that seem to be very much alive. It is not simply their form, but also the inner workings of their operating systems that speak to Grassi. Inspiration comes from women mathematicians and computer scientists like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. The Jacquard loom, one of the earliest computer systems, also makes its way into Grassi’s practice. Not only do many of her machines resemble its form, but it also provides a link to her roots. Grassi’s mother and aunts worked in the garment industry, and she herself worked as a textile designer. The recurrent threads in her paintings seem to hold these influences and memories together at the seams.
Antonietta Grassi’s use of colour and the grid speak to the works of women artists from the canon of twentieth century modernist abstraction-another coding system in its own right: Helen Frankenthaler and Agnes Martin can be glimpsed underneath the multicoloured horizontal lines. Like Eva Hesse, she adds her own personal touch to a seemingly impersonal subject by imbuing the machine with life and feeling. Her approach to painting is both intuitive and intentional, charged with memory, but also mathematically and technically precise. And there is always an expression of hope and connection, despite the age in which we happen to find ourselves.
Agnes Martin (1912–2004) was a Canadian-born American painter celebrated for her serene, minimalist compositions of delicate grids, subtle hand drawn lines, and a muted color palette. After moving to the United States, she spent significant periods in the American Southwest, particularly in New Mexico. Often associated with both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, her work sought to evoke states of quiet contemplation and transcendence, drawing on influences from Zen Buddhism and the natural world. Martin’s paintings are known for their meditative precision, restraint, and the spiritual potential of abstraction.
Martin has been a long-standing source of inspiration throughout Grassi’s practice. Like Martin, Grassi often uses geometry, repetition, and a finely tuned sense of color to create rhythmic, meditative compositions. While Grassi works with more saturated hues and references the grid found in textile structures and technology, she shares Martin’s pursuit of the poetic possibilities of line, form and balance through the meditative process of repetition.
Alma Thomas (1891–1978) was an African American painter best known for her vibrant and rhythmic abstractions. Based in Washington, D.C., for much of her career, she was deeply connected to the American South through her upbringing in Columbus, Georgia, which shaped her sense of color, light, and pattern. Associated with the Washington Color School, Thomas developed a distinctive style that combined rigorous abstraction that was musical in its energy. Her work explored the expressive possibilities of color and form, creating paintings that radiate joy, movement, and a celebration of life and nature.
Thomas’s embrace of color as an important vehicle for emotion and meaning in her abstract paintings has served as a significant source of inspiration for Grassi. Like Thomas, Grassi uses abstraction to explore rhythm, repetition, and the interplay of structure and spontaneity. While Grassi’s works incorporate textile references, layered surfaces, and subtler tones, she shares Thomas’s commitment to the expressive power of color and the way it can evoke both personal resonance and universal connection.
The Gee’s Bend quilters are a group of African American women from the community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, whose quilt-making tradition dates to the mid-19th century. The residents of Gee's Bend, are direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee.Rooted in the American South, their work is celebrated for its bold improvisation, inventive use of geometry, and vibrant color combinations, often created from repurposed fabric. While deeply functional in origin, these quilts are now recognized as powerful works of modern art, embodying resilience, cultural memory, and a uniquely expressive visual language that bridges craft and fine art.
Grassi’s considers the Gee’s Bend quilters as significant contributors to the modernist cannon and shares with them an interest in geometry, pattern, and color. Their work serving as a meaningful and ongoing source of inspiration for her. Like the quilters, Grassi weaves together structure and improvisation, allowing color, shape, and rhythm to guide the composition. While her paintings reference technology and textiles through a more minimal and abstract lens, they echo the Gee’s Bend tradition in their celebration of hand-made process, layered history, and the deep narratives that can be carried through pattern and form.